About me

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Liverpool, United Kingdom
I am interested in how we can use DNA sequences to understand biodiversity – how do we recognise species, and how are species related at taxonomic, ecological and geographic levels? My passion for biodiversity research has led me from the world’s largest natural history collection - Natural History Museum, London, where I completed my MSc, to the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario - global centre for the international Barcode of Life, as a PhD student, and to the hyper-diverse tropics of Southeast Asia. The tropics will be the first regions to experience historically unprecedented climates and this will happen within the next decade. Consequently my recent research has focussed on understanding the effects of urbanisation and climate change on tropical and subtropical biodiversity - encompassing both species richness and ecological integrity across a diversity of taxonomic groups.

Sep 29, 2017

RESEARCH UPDATE - MALAYSIAN BATS

I've been working with bats in Peninsular Malaysia for some time now. For this study we were interested in knowing how the ecology of bats changes in urban areas. This paper led by VC Lim, a PhD student I cosupervise at the University of Malaya (UM), fits under our (now completed) Newton Institutional Links programme. As part of the programme, VC went for training at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and Joanne Littlefair, a postdoc at QMUL came to visit my lab at UM.

Here is the popular summary we wrote for Asia Research News: http://www.researchsea.com/html/article.php/aid/11105/cid/1/research/technology/university_of_malaya/feeding_habit_of_malaysian_fruit_bats_.html

And here is the paper published in Urban Ecosystems: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-017-0700-3


The Lesser Dog-faced Fruit Bat, Cynopterus brachyotis which is the most common bat in Peninsular Malaysia and feeds mainly on fruits. Copyright : VC Lim